Opinion: We must replace Obamacare with a moral, workable system

Clinton will lead us to single-payer, but we should go the opposite way

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Socialized health care creates equality: Everyone gets mediocre care. That’s why we must get rid of Obamacare and create a moral system that’s designed to work for patients.

By

BlaineWinship

As one of the lawyers in the vanguard of litigating against Obamacare in the courts back in 2010, I have long maintained that it sounded the death knell for private insurance in the health-care industry.

That’s because insurance only works when coverage is bought before your car crashes, or your home floods, or you get really sick. If we can wait until disaster strikes and then purchase that coverage at the same price anyway, why would anyone in his or her right mind buy it in advance?

Obamacare’s answer was to force us all to buy coverage whether we want it or not — the so-called individual mandate. But while a refusal to get coverage was to be sanctioned through a penalty — which our chief justice later magically transformed into a “tax” in order to uphold the act — the penalty was not made severe enough to achieve its purpose; and so legions of young and healthy Americans have opted to pay the penalty and forgo coverage.

But the chief justice, making up the rule of law as he went, also suggested that if the amount of the penalty were increased enough to be coercive, it might actually become a “penalty” after all, and the act might then become unconstitutional.

So here we are, with a monstrosity of legislation that has spawned even worse regulatory monstrosities and another Supreme Court assault on our Constitution, all predicated on the bogus notion that health-care insurance could work contrary to the very essence of insurance. But it had to be clear to those who drafted the 2,700-page act behind closed doors (so much for the “transparency” that Obama promised us) that private insurers could not function in that environment.

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The fact that insurance stocks surged upon passage of the act was jarring to those of us who understood this, but likely reflected the short-term thinking powering so many American companies’ decisions these days: they could make a quick killing for a while through jacked-up premiums, and they were right. But now the day of reckoning is upon us, and Aetna’s announced departure from the statewide exchanges is just the latest shoe to drop.

My even-greater concern back in 2010 was that Obamacare was never designed to work, but instead was to serve as a transition between the then-current status quo, an admixture of private and subsidized health-care, and the single-payer system that Hillary Clinton had sought back in 1993, with the federal government to be that single payer, giving it top-down control over more than a quarter of our economy.

The liberals and progressives of the Democratic Party — and in particular Clinton, an acolyte of the radical Saul Alinsky — never let a crisis go to waste as an opportunity to expand their power over us, even when they created the crisis in the first place.

So we can depend on Clinton to twist the disaster of Obamacare to her advantage in seeking the presidency. Never mind that socialized medicine, like all socialistic systems, deadens incentives for excellence and innovation, and instead leads to reduced quality and long waiting lines — predictable results because socialism in its essence rewards excellence and mediocrity the same, a form of “social justice” that achieves equality of outcome by dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator of performance.

For other nations that have embraced this approach, the results thus far may not have seemed as bad as they otherwise might, because they could look to America for the innovations that have brought about the biggest improvements in health-care outcomes over the past half-century. But if we also take the socialized medicine path, who will we look to for those innovations half a century from now?

There are much better ways for us to go.

If instead we embrace an approach that keys on our economic freedom to reward excellence and to encourage making our best better, and if we bring universal morality into our commerce — with patients empowered to shop around for the providers they want, and with providers having incentives to please their patients rather than the federal government — we can light the way to a glorious future.

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